His father always wanted him to go on boat trips!. A canoe, a pontoon, a sh*tty little fishing boat with holes in the bottom and a smoking 3-horse engine knotted to the back, sometimes just a sh*tty little fishing boat without the motor, only a pair of long handled wooden oars with the stain mostly worn off on the paddle ends!. Any boat would do, just as long as his father had his son’s company, his boy’s undying attention and innocent ear, a companion that would listen and nod his head and talk scarcely and call him dad!.
Every Saturday for the entire summer of the ninth year of his life he was taken out on the boats, out to the middle where the water waited with frosted tops and the weed bottoms sucked at the surface and swirled its traps above!. His father always seemed to find the exact middle of the lake, the perfect spot to make the boy feel small and insignificant and lonely; the place that made it okay to talk about things that you couldn’t mention at the dinner table or on the way to church!. What was said and done in that boat was eternally trapped there, surrounded by the metal sheen of the water and the razor like ripples of the waves!. It was as if the secrets of his father had no way of escaping, with the waves, the boat, and the words that were spoken keeping them there to live on forever!. He wished his father hadn’t bothered talking about things beyond the boat’s dark prison; his words were out of place and unreachable to the boy!. It was all that God-damned talking that made everything worse than it had to be, and it was the doing, not the talking, that he could eventually forget!.
When he found himself laying face down on the hot tin surface of the pontoon boat, he always tried to pretend he was playing games and laughing with the kids at school, ignoring the burn on his cheek and the calloused grip of his father's sun baked hands!. He would close his eyes and make the images of his friends appear, force them from their false hiding places in the twilight of his mind and bring them to life on the boat with him!. Sometimes he would laugh out loud when he saw them and his father's grip would tighten and his father's voice would clear itself in the thick August air and his FATHER'S breathing would sing louder with the gathering wind until the gripping hand fell from his bleeding bottom and the open hand would cup itself over his mouth and slowly slide around his tiny neck to the back of his head and begin rubbing the thin brown strands that hung there wet, like weeds from the waiting shoreline!.
"Henry, have you been shootin' that gun I bought ya!?"
"Yah, dad, I shot at the bails you put out in back!. But I still need some pictures or somethin' to aim at!."
"First thing we get back I'll draw some up and cut 'em out offa that cardboard in the garage!."
"Can I wash up in the lake before we hook the boat up!?"
"Godammit, boy, 'course you will and don't get them clothes wet or yer mother'd not let ya come out no more on these boat trips!."
"I'm hungry!. My stomach's makin' noises!."
In the dusk at the edge of the water, he looked down and saw a school of perch nipping at a bottle top that slowly swayed on the sandy bottom of the shore!. He wondered if they would swim away again when he stepped in to wash himself!. He wondered where they went and if they had fathers that took them places they didn't want to be!. He wanted to swim with them, to float with them, to nip at bottle tops and eat from the bottom of the lake with them!. He hated them and didn't know why!. He hated the way they looked, the way they swam away when he stepped into the lake, no matter how quietly and slowly he moved!. They always swam away!. They must hate him, too!.
Www@QuestionHome@Com